Integrated Forest Gardening is the first, and most comprehensive, guide about plant guilds ever written, and it covers in detail both what guilds are and how to design and construct them, complete with extensive color photography and design illustrations. Other books on permaculture cover this topic, but never in enough depth to be replicable in a serious way.

One of the essential practices of permaculture is to develop perennial agricultural systems that thrive over several decades without expensive and harmful inputs. Those systems include perennial-plant guilds, food forests, agroforestry, and mixed animal- and woody-species polycultures.

The guild concept often used is one of a “functional relationship” between plants—beneficial groupings of plants that share functions in order to bring health and stability to a plant regime and create an abundant yield for our utilization. In other words, it is the integration of species that creates a balanced, healthy, and thriving ecosystem.

The massive degradation of conventional agriculture and the environmental havoc it creates has never been as all pervasive in terms of scale, so it has become a global necessity to further the understanding of a comprehensive design and planning system such as permaculture that works with nature, not against it.

Integrated Forest Gardening will benefit readers of any scale, from permaculture designers and professional growers, to backyard growers new to the concept of permaculture.